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Saturday, January 22, 2011

The Language Question in Africa

Since the encounter with the West, Africans have never stopped lamenting the marginalization of their indigenous languages, epitomized especially by the famous debate between two of Africa's foremost men of letters - the Nigerian Chinua Achebe and the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The question has been raised again in this recent article from The Economist with the concern coming from South Africa.

However, one of the major issues which is often forgotten in these debates is that language survival is also connected to influence and power. The language situation in America may be taken as an example: even though many Americans regularly interact with those who speak Spanish, the current craze is to learn Mandarin Chinese. Why is this so? It is so because China is becoming influential and powerful. Many now believe that it would be necessary to know Mandarin if one hopes to advance in the future. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. However, what is clear in the South African case is that English and Afrikaans are the languages that carry influence and power, for obvious historical reasons. Other languages cannot just become important to everyone because the South African government says so. People must come to see that it is advantageous to learn a language before they may be committed to it. Departments of African languages will continue to close in South African universities and elsewhere if students do not see that it is important to learn them. Given that these languages do not carry power and influence, there is hardly any motivation to learn them. All this means that power and influence have an intricate connection with the spread of language. Any discussion of the language question in Africa that fails to see this connection but rather concentrates on lamenting the decline of African languages is merely playing the Ostrich. Perhaps the world historical perception of the emergence and decline of language has something going for it: in interaction of various peoples in the world, some languages survive and others don't. Those that survive are the ones that are useful. Period.

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